The Deacon's Bench - February, 2010

From time to time when I’m visiting people at the hospital I’ll come into a room just as someone wakes up. The first thing they see is me: a nice old guy with a white beard. Sometimes this doesn’t have quite the effect we hope for. One patient nearly jumped out of his skin and exclaimed “Are you God!? Am I dead?!!!” I was taken aback myself. Nothing like that had happened to me since I was in Haiti back in 1999 and a little boy mistook me for Jesus Christ. I reassured him on both points and we moved on.

Mistaken identities can cause problems, especially when the identity about which we’re mistaken is our own. Counselors and psychologists are familiar with the masks (personas) that we build as we go through life. A persona is the face we present to the world; how we wish to be known. In some sense it’s a selective distillation of all of our experiences, attributes and capabilities, packaged to enable us to reach our conscious and subconscious goals.

A persona is necessary for daily life, but it isn’t who we really are – at least not entirely. We can get into considerable trouble of we believe that all we are is what we’ve made ourselves out to be. We may have created our persona, but we did not create our being. Only God does that. Much of what we are is utterly hidden from us until someone points it out. It’s always worth taking the trouble to broaden and deepen our view, because the exercise is essentially redemptive. It may be surprising or even frightening, but it always takes us closer to the view of ourselves that God has.

What might God’s view look like? Psalm 139, 1-21 tells us - take a look.

It sounds like God has a pretty good handle on who we are. Perhaps this Lent we might choose to ask God to take us by the hand and begin to show us who we really are, not as we see ourselves, but as God sees us. God loves us and wants to bridge the gulf between us and him. Who knows, after we see ourselves the way God sees us, we might even want to do the same thing!